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From TimeWellSpent.io, “a community of design thinkers, philosophers, social scientists, entrepreneurs and technologists who care about having technology designed to help us live free and fulfilled lives”:

1. Create a tools-only home screen. Limit your home screen to the top 4-6 tools you use frequently to get things done. Move all other apps off the first page and into folders.

2. Open other apps by typing. Typing filters out unconscious choices while keeping conscious ones. Open apps by typing their name.

3. Keep only two pages of apps. With six pages of apps, we find ourselves swiping back and forth through them mindlessly. Keep to two pages, the first with tools and the other with folders.

4. Turn off notifications, except from people. Only get notifications when people want your attention, not businesses or machines.

5. Keep the M&M’s, but hide the wrappers. Colorful icons are designed to trigger us to use apps unconsciously. Put these on the second or third page inside folders, and open them by typing instead.

6. Stop leaky interactions. Set your Alarm or Camera without unlocking your phone so you get kicked out automaticaly afterwards. Swipe up on the lock screen to quickly access.

8. Buy a travel alarm clock and charge outside the bedroom. Waking up to check our phone sets our day off to a bad start. Get a separate alarm clock and leave your phone outside to charge.

9. Know your bottomless bowls and slot machines. Know which apps are bottomless bowls (trapdoors) and slot machines (constant checking) for you. Move them off the first page of apps.

Notes:
(1) How convinced are you by these suggestions?
(2) What have you tried which has worked?
(3) An alternative view: “Ultimately, I don’t think we’re going to be able to either liberate or self-regulate our way out of mental fragmentation” — Matthew Crawford.

If you control the menu, you control the choices. Magicians give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that they win, no matter what you choose. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind.

When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask: “What’s not on the menu?”, “Why am I being given these options and not others?”, “Do I know the menu provider’s goals?”, and “Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?”.

The most empowering menu is different than the menu that has the most choices. But when we blindly surrender to the menus we’re given, it’s easy to lose track of the difference.

When we wake up in the morning and turn our phone over to see a list of notifications — it frames the experience of “waking up in the morning” around a menu of “all the things I’ve missed since yesterday.” By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones.

But the closer we pay attention to the options we’re given, the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.

Afterwards I found myself reflecting on how people’s minds change. It never does happen just there and then, with someone saying, “Yes — I see, I was quite wrong and you’ve changed my mind.” But over time the bits of your own argument that have become unsupportable simply crumble away, usually without you even acknowledging it.

In the first few weeks of a startup’s life, the founders really need to figure out what they’re doing and why. Then they need to build a product some users really love. Only after that they should focus on growth above all else.

I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?” Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.

Hypnosis rule #1 is that you leave out the details and allow people to fill in the blanks with their own imagination. That’s why, for example, my comic characters have no last names while working in a nameless company for a nameless boss in a nameless location. I don’t want a reader in France to think Dilbert is an American and therefore of little interest. I want the French reader, the Elbonian, and the American to look at the Dilbert characters and say some version of “That character is me!” In order to achieve that effect, I intentionally omit details that would knock you off the track. For example, the minute I give Dilbert a last name it would over-specify his ethnic origins and give folks a reason to feel less connected.

A golden rule in sales is “Don’t sell past the close.” That means that once your customer says yes, you stop talking about the product because you might accidentally say something that stops the sale. You never add detail when the customer is already sold. The less you say, the more likely the customer (who is already sold) will continue talking himself into loving the decision because people like to think they are smart.

Now review Trump’s empty sentence: We need to take America back. From whom? Notice the intentional lack of detail? In this case, the lack of detail is the powerful part of the sentence. See how the open-ended suggestion works? Every voter is free to fill in the topic of their own greatest fear. Trump invites you to hypnotize yourself to finish the thought. And you do.

Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a three year study whose goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds. The result was dramatic: none of the interventions worked.

When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur. If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.

False beliefs, it turns out, have little to do with one’s stated political affiliations and far more to do with self-identity: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person do I want to be? All ideologies are similarly affected.

Facts and evidence may not be the answer everyone thinks they are: they simply aren’t that effective, given how selectively they are processed and interpreted. Instead, why not focus on presenting issues in a way keeps broader notions out of it—messages that are not political, not ideological, not in any way a reflection of who you are?

The 25 minute design sprint forces designers to work quickly and focus on what they can learn rather than what they can produce. It’s based on the Pomodoro Technique, which uses blocks of 25 minutes followed by five minute breaks to focus attention on getting something done. It can be used continuously throughout a project, breaking all parts of the design work into 25 minute slices, or stopped when you feel you are getting somewhere and have clear direction.

The Process
1. Using a timer, set up 25 minutes for the first sprint.
2. Each designer works individually for 25 minutes to create and explore ideas, ideally using sketching first. Include at least 10 minutes of researching and gaining inspiration.
3. When the 25 minutes ends, everyone stops what they are working on. (Don’t give in to “I just need another five minutes”.)
4. The whole team comes together to discuss and share their ideas.
5. The team decides if each designer should persevere (develop their ideas) or pivot (try something different) in the next sprint.
6. Take a five minute break from work.
7. The sprint process then starts over again.

Users are only ever in three states — they’ve never heard about it; they’ve tried it; and they use it. What you’re managing is state change. So the framework is, what causes these changes? The answer should be rooted more in preference, choice and psychology than in some quantitative thing.

What I want to hear about is the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with. How to get people on the front door? How to get them to an ‘A-ha’ moment as quickly as possible? And then how do you deliver core product value as often as possible?

Don’t start with an apology. You’re late, your equipment malfunctions, you don’t have your materials, or whatever. You apologize in advance for how this might affect your presentation. This is a mistake because an apology sets a negative tone that may affect the entire meeting and makes you seem like a victim. Nobody wants to do business with a victim. Instead, start on an upbeat note, as if nothing is wrong. This communicates that you’re cool under pressure–the opposite of being a victim.

Don’t make personal excuses. You downgrade the audience’s expectations by offering an excuse in advance for your poor performance. (E.g., “I’m so tired”; “I got in late last night.”) This is a mistake because you’re giving yourself an excuse so you won’t feel so bad if you fail. Plus, nobody wants to hear you whine about your problems. Instead, regardless of how you’re feeling, show enthusiasm for being there and make your best effort.

Design is a multi layered process. In my experience, there is an optimal order to how you move through the layers:

1. Outcome. Start with the intended outcome. What will the thing you’re designing make easier or better for people? Most projects without a clearly defined intended outcome don’t end well. At Intercom, we work with Clay Christensen’s Jobs framework for product design. We frame every design problem in a Job, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome: When _____ , I want to _____ , so I can _____ .

2. Structure. Next, design the system. Work out the required components to meet the intended outcome, and map the relationship between them.

3. Interaction. After the outcome and system are figured out, design the interaction details. What are the microinteractions? The sequence of behavior and events? What are the UI components, and how will people interact with or manipulate them? How will things move, change or animate? Revisit the system, evolve it to match the interactions. Keep iterating.

4. Visual. Once the outcome, system and interactions are well defined and working (ideally prototyped), design the visual details. Make it look and feel beautiful, enjoyable. Now it’s time for beautiful grids, color, typography, iconography.

I see designer after designer focus on the fourth layer without really considering the others.

Kate Meyer, a user experience expert at Nielsen Norman Group, examined how different users approach flat interfaces. Younger users liked flat websites a lot more than their older counterparts. Older users said the flattest website designs were “boring,” while younger subjects described them as “professional.”

However, while young people seemed faster at navigating the designs, they also indicated they didn’t really understand the UI intuitively. For the most part they seemed to have pretty much no idea what they were doing. “It’s hard when you think something’s a link and it’s not. And you have to figure out how to get it another way,” one user said. Young people didn’t necessarily “get” flat designs. They were just better at quickly testing where and how to get what they wanted in the face of click uncertainty.

Paying attention to the older users might help to solve flat design’s usability issues sooner. Some technology companies are moving to “inclusive design”, the notion that by designing for ignored or underserved users—including the elderly or disabled—products will become better for all. It has quietly spurred some of the biggest technological leaps of our time. The typewriter, email, and even the telephone evolved out of designs for the blind and deaf.

Notes:
(1) Kate Meyer argues here that focusing on older users improves user experience for everybody. Perhaps that’s because older users are less able to tolerate “click uncertainty” and other user interface failures.
(2) Older users are also becoming more important in their own right, as demographic changes raise the percentage of older people in the population. And some services — such as investing sites like Seeking Alpha — appeal disproportionately to older users.
(3) The most obvious way to reduce “click uncertainty” is to ensure that what is clickable is obvious and differentiated from what isn’t clickable. (The most common error is to present links in the same color as non-clickable text.)
(4) See also Web design for seniors.

You need to actually understand the problem before you look to solve it. And you need to solve it with a distinct point-of-view.

Notes:
(1) Although this was written for UX designers, I think it applies more broadly to early stage startups.
(2) Seed stage startups need to get three things right: (i) Ensure there’s a real problem (= Job To Be Done). (ii) Be clear about the unique focus, approach or insight you bring to solving that problem. (iii) Ensure you have a basic business model that will generate profits, based on what works in other businesses.
(3) What seed stage startups don’t need to get right immediately, because this is what you’ll be working on for the next few years: (i) You don’t need to nail down all the details of your product. (ii) You don’t need a detailed financial forecast, including pricing and margins.
(4) Re. “you need to solve it with a distinct point-of-view”: See the questions about competitive advantage in Six simple questions to test product-market fit and competitive advantage (from Y Combinator’s application form).

Deliverable: MVP and 10,000 delighted beta users who would recommend the product.

Notes:
(1) Love the clarity: “Here’s how much we want to raise, and here, in one short sentence, is what we’ll deliver for that budget.”
(2) Note that the key deliverable is a product of demonstrated quality — an MVP with high net promotor score, validated by a sufficient number of users.
(3) Setting net promotor score as an explicit goal stops the company from trying to scale before the product is good enough. See The most fatal mistake to avoid as a startup.

When taking questions about your product answer questions shortly. This is a very challenging thing for many people–including myself–to do. If you’re like me, you’ve probably thought out your startup’s issues a thousand different ways. Answer the question with the most concise answer.

We’ve been using group chat at 37signals/Basecamp for 10 years. I’ve seen the distraction, anxiety, stress, and misunderstanding group chat can cause. Those are things that can really damage people and an organization.

I believe attention is one of your most precious resources. If something else controls my attention, that something else controls what I’m capable of. I also believe your full attention is required to do great work. So when something like a pile of group chats, and the expectations that come along with them, systematically steals that resource from me, I consider it a potential enemy.

That said, I still think group chat is an important tool in the communications toolbox. I just don’t think it’s the go-to tool. I think it’s the exception tool.

Automate and outsource everything. OK, maybe not everything, but everything that is possible — which is a lot more than you probably think. We did a great job at Appcelerator with this — but we could have done better.

You’ll want to spend all your calories on things that you do best, different, uniquely and the thing that makes you and your business valuable. Trust me, that’s not your website (which of course, is not to say that’s not important). Sure, maybe your dev can do the corporate website by herself over the weekend much cheaper than finding an agency to do it or a contractor. It will seem and be cheaper (and maybe faster) in the short-term. But it will really cost you in so many areas.

Same with systems. Maybe one of your devs could just setup Gitlab on your own server and that’s a little bit cheaper than paying for the $7/month for a small plan at Github. But trust me, it’s not. It’s just not worth it.

Try and automate and outsource things that aren’t core to your mission. Keep your calories focused on activities that will create muscle — and don’t do anything (if you can avoid it) else.

Now, like other recommendations, this isn’t an absolute and sometimes this can conflict with “burn less”. But generally, if it seems cheaper in the short-term, make sure you consider the long term ROI and other non-financial metrics (such as distraction).

I try to never hire someone who has been a product manager before. I’ve never seen a correlation with past experience and future success when it comes to product managers. Instead, there are a set of patterns we look for when hiring product managers:

1. Are they truly a product junkie? Are they the first to be playing around with new products? Are they telling me about some product I don’t know about? Do they know about more products than me? And do they have passion around this? I love to have candidates show me their phone or desktop to see which apps they are using, which new products they are testing.

2. Are they curious? Are they settling for yes or questioning why? Do they want to learn from others? What ideas do they have for products? How would they make them better? Pick a product on the spot and ask them to show you how they use it, what they’d change and how they would improve it.

3. How do they work everyday? What do they use from a process standpoint? Trello? Evernote? ProdPad? The best PM’s are always trying new things and finding ways to improve when it comes to process and organization.

4. Do they have a customer-driven mindset? It’s the PMs job to understand the customer better than nearly everyone else. PMs should be talking to the customer the most at your company other than support. Can they help engineering and design get closer to the customer?

Two things don’t matter: Technical ability, and dashboards, slide decks and Excel. Looking at data all day is not what being a PM is about.

Not only do repeated negative thoughts make it easier to think yet more negative thoughts, they also make it more likely that negative thoughts will occur to you just randomly walking down the street. Being consistently negative starts to push your personality towards the negative.

Hanging out with negative people does much the same. When we see someone experiencing an emotion (be it anger, sadness, happiness, etc), our brain ‘tries out’ that same emotion to imagine what the other person is going through. And it does this by attempting to fire the same synapses in your own brain so that you can attempt to relate to the emotion you’re observing.

Most organizations are capable of maintaining a consistent level of exceptional performance through a year, or five years, maybe ten years. Very few are able to do it over multiple decades. How have we done it?

1. Yesterday is irrelevant. The best leaders want to make sure that their product is fresh, that it changes with the times; that they never rest on their laurels, or get complacent; that they always have an element of insecurity about feeling that they can always get eaten by a competitor, and that past successes don’t mean all that much. All your past success is yesterday, and it’s irrelevant to the future.

2. Maintain a fresh team. You have to focus on the team. Field the best team at any one time, no matter how long people have been with you. Don’t be unfair, or ruthless, or harsh; but detached, objective and clinical about the performance of each individual. No matter how well they’ve performed in the past, if their heart is no longer in it, if they no longer have the burning desire to compete, it’s time for them to move on. Bring in young people who have zest, ambition, energy.

3. Change with the market. Stay alert to market opportunities. When we started a long time ago we were just here in Menlo Park, but the world of technology has changed, because of what’s happening principally in China. So about 12, 13 years ago, we started a business in China because we felt that, over time, it was going to be increasingly important for Sequoia, for the companies that we have investments in in Silicon Valley, to really understand the Chinese market because of what was going to happen there.

I sat down earlier today and thought about all of the A-players I’ve been fortunate enough to hire over the years at my five previous companies, and came up with seven questions you can use in your interview process to give you a much better chance of finding and hiring them:

Q1 Have they been promoted at least once in a previous role?

Q2 Have they had to lead a big project in a previous role? How did they handle it?

Q3 Is this the same role as a previous job or is it somewhat/completely different?

Q4 Can they speak about your company and tell you what they like and what they might change?

Q5 Are they confident without being cocky?

Q6 Are they committed to continual learning? Can they prove it?

Q7 How would you rate the quality and quantity of questions they ask YOU during the interview?

We became obsessed with the idea of our utility value to users who swear by us. This is a two-step test, which essentially says this: How much of a personal or professional utility value do your users ascribe to your brand? And how indispensable are you to the ecosystem you exist in? While media companies focused on scale-for-scale-sake talk about unique visitors to their sites, we talk about unique residents.

There are people who build media companies for valuation, then there are others who build media brands for value. Internalizing that difference has made all the difference to us.

All of this hides an ugly unspoken truth about media in general: that it is disposable, in so many ways. The key is to move towards making yourself non-disposable, by adding enough value.

A product has a core user experience, which is basically the reason the product exists. It fulfills a need or solves a problem people have. By doing so, the product becomes meaningful and provides certain value. If the problem is non-existent, or the solution doesn’t fit the problem, the product becomes meaningless and people won’t use it. This in turn leads to the failure of the product.

Wrong solutions can be fixed, but non-existent problems aren’t fixable.

So when thinking about products, UX designers should first answer the following questions:
1. What problem are we solving? (User problem)
2. For whom are we doing this? (Target audience)
3. Why are we doing this? (Vision)
4. How are we doing this? (Strategy)
5. What do we want to achieve? (Goals)

Only then does it make sense to think about exactly what we’re doing (Features).

I think the mind is like a forest floor: the more you walk paths the deeper they get and the easier it is to walk them again. When I wasn’t doing so great, there was a path falling into unhappiness, and the more I walked on it, the deeper that path got. It’s important to learn how to tell yourself, “No, I’m not thinking about that right now. As a matter of fact I’m never thinking about that; we’re done here.” Eventually, if you let it, that darker path will get covered up with leaves; the leaves will disintegrate over the winter and by spring there will be new dirt covering it. The path is still there but it’s shallow and small and you don’t have to fall into walking it. In the meantime if you build more positive paths they will become easier and easier to find.

One of the biggest realizations I had is that happiness isn’t something that happens to you. It’s a choice.

A lot of the time we let ourselves show up late because the event we’re showing up to isn’t all that important to us. Try this: don’t schedule events that aren’t that important to you. Use that time for things that are important to you.

I know, there are a lot of things in your life that feel obligatory, like the weekly status report meeting at work, or dinner at your spouse’s or partner’s parents. Either make those things important to you, or figure out how to cut them from your calendar.

Notes:
(1) The article then lists some useful suggestions for how to be more punctual, such as: not checking your email or voicemail right before you leave; adding 25% to your time estimate to get anywhere or do any task; getting everything ready for morning meetings the night before; and entering appointments 10 mins early in your calendar.
(2) But I think the insight quoted above is more important. We’re often late to events because we’re ambivalent about whether we really want to be there (or whether they justify the time including travel). Dustin Wax’s solution is to force ourselves to decide: either attend with a full heart and arrive on time, or say “no”.
(3) Reasons to “do it right or not at all”: latecomers hurt the productivity of everyone who has to wait, and demoralize the people who turn up on time and make them feel disrespected. And in Dustin’s words, “people who are habitually late (or are late even once, when it counts) project incompetence, self-centeredness, and even a lack of integrity”.
(4) Related: How much of other people’s time do you waste?

We decided that, if we were to systematically reduce churn, we’d need to systematically study it and find its source. What I found was illuminating. There were very strong differences in the behavior of users who had abandoned Groove and the behavior of those who stayed. These are our “Red Flag Metrics”, and we use them to identify churn before it happens.

When we looked at the numbers, there were two metrics that seemed to be the most significant in the first 30 days after a user signs up – length of first session and frequency of logins. (There was a difference in total number of logins as well, but it wasn’t as disparate as the other two.) The average user who did not quit after 30 days spent three minutes and 18 seconds using Groove in their first session, and logged in an average of 4.4 times a day. The average user who quit spent 35 seconds using Groove in their first session, and logged in an average of 0.3 times per day.

So we began to send targeted emails to users who spent less than 2 minutes on their first session, as well as to those who (regardless of first session time) logged in fewer than 2 times a day in their first 10 days. We reduced our churn from about 4.5% to 1.6%.

Building an incredible product is definitely about optimizing it for the people who use your product the most. But when it comes to driving growth, people who are already using your product are not the ones you have to worry about. What you need to focus on is the marginal user. The one person who doesn’t get a notification in a given day, month, or year.

We looked at new users, resurrected users (people who weren’t on Facebook for 30 days and came back) and churned users. For pretty much every product I’ve ever seen, the resurrected and churned numbers dominate the new user account once you reach a sensible point of growth a few years in. And all those users who are churning and resurrecting had low friend counts, and didn’t find their friends so weren’t connected to the great stuff that was going on on Facebook. So the number one thing we needed to focus on was getting them to those 10 friends, or whatever number of friends they needed.

So when you’re thinking about growth, think about the user on the margin.

Notes:
(1) Thank you Aaron Frazer for the article tip.
(2) “Focus on the marginal user” — Josh Elman says the Twitter team similarly focused on the lowest four steps of user engagement — see Identify your engagement ladder.
(3) Re. “For pretty much every product I’ve ever seen , the resurrected and churned numbers dominate the new user account once you reach a sensible point of growth a few years in… So the number one thing we needed to focus on was them” — Cf. A simple metric to measure the quality of your user growth.

Nothing slows down a startup like bad hiring — except when you keep those bad hires around for longer than you should. The key to firing lies in 4 principles:

1. The employee should see it coming – they should know in advance that being let go is a real possibility if they don’t improve.

2. They should be given a chance to improve — they need to know exactly what you expect of them and should agree to meet that one key, measurable goal within a specific time period.

3. Their ego should never be damaged — help them transition out of the role by providing a reference, reaching out to your network and providing 1-4 weeks of severance; most people can find a new job, but they have to break the bad news to their partner, kids and friends.

4. Never lie to your other employees about why the person was fired — be brief, but make it clear they were fired for performance reasons. This helps set a culture based on performance, not politics or tenure.

(This should not be confused with the normal finance quick ratio that measures the ability of cash and near cash assets to pay off liabilities.)

This ratio needs to be greater than one if the app is to be growing, otherwise churn is overwhelming growth.

Most consumer applications don’t have a very strong mechanism to bring users back month after month and so the quick ratio tends to be just above 1. The dynamic for each month in a consumer app is typically to add a bunch of users and to simultaneously lose a bunch of users with a small additive piece on top from resurrection yielding overall small positive growth.

All else being equal, a company with the same growth but a higher quick ratio is more attractive company to us because it is starting from a better base. With high retention, it would be worth trying to push harder on the top of funnel with new users to drive growth (more aggressive sharing/referral mechanisms, paid acquisition, etc.). If a company has higher churn, it’s harder to justify pushing on new users as you would end up losing many of them. It’s easier to fill the top of funnel than it is to fix some underlying churn problem.

This accounting can be done on time-frames other than calendar months. Indeed, several of our portfolio companies implement it on a rolling 28 day basis (to remove day-of-week effects).

You get attention by identifying a problem and playing it up. Look at the current American presidential candidates; you’d be pardoned for thinking that Armageddon was around the corner if you took them seriously.

But by the end of the talk, you should be covering what it is that you love and what’s working in your world. Long-term careers are based on positive trajectories, not negative ones.

One piece of feedback we received was a feature for a user to get an email every single time a specific event occurred for one of their campaigns. Our user wanted to know every time a campaign started, ended, was performing poorly, hit the halfway mark, was off to a bad start, had little traffic, or reached its spending limit.

Now, imagine having 20 mobile campaigns running on any given day and receiving 20-30 emails all within a short time frame. Despite what the user wanted, this would have overwhelmed their inbox with non-actionable items in a non-organized way.

So I set up a handful of video chats and in-person interviews. We distilled all our findings and discovered the user’s one basic need: they simply wanted to know if their campaigns are doing okay.

Getting user feedback is the most important thing any UX designer, engineer, business owner, and product manager could do. But don’t just take that feedback and design a solution based on what the user says. Dig deeper to figure out your user’s root problem.

Don’t try to figure out what the user wants. Try to figure out why they want it.

Notes:
(1) “The user’s one basic need”, “your user’s root problem”, and “Why they want it” are all other names for: your customers’ Job To Be Done. See A brief summary of Job To Be Done, with 3 takeaways for product managers.
(2) Another technique to uncover the Job To Be Done from a (possibly misguided) feature request is to keep asking “Why does that matter to you?” or just “Why?”. See 5 Whys.

What are the secrets of WeWork’s design? How does the physical space itself contribute to productivity, inspiration and positivity?

WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey, a trained architect and interior designer, highlights two key aspects: glass and natural light. “We like to ensure that there’s lots of natural light. We intentionally seek out properties that are on a corner or that have a lot of light, and then we make interior walls out of glass, or if that’s not possible, we’ll plan out where to place solid walls so we don’t block people’s access to daylight. Another benefit of glass walls: it adds an element of transparency and accountability. When you’re surrounded by other people who are working hard, you’re more likely to work hard, too.”

Notes:
(1) At Seeking Alpha we learned that there are three key factors in successful office design. First, you want to give people a sense of privacy, cosiness cosiness and quiet, so they can concentrate on their work. Second, you want to maximize the amount of natural light. And third, you want to provide opportunities for unscripted interaction.
(2) The problem is that the need for quiet and cosiness conflicts with the need for natural light and unscripted interaction. At Seeking Alpha we built interior glass walls, used large plants to provide cosiness without blocking out light and interaction, and created inviting common areas.
(3) See (i) How to create a healthy office , (ii) Office design: two tips to get seating right, (iii) The problem with open offices, and (iv) Startup office design: Time to reconsider cubicles?

Before you begin to define the features and details of your product, imagine what users would say about the final version:

Write a tweet from the perspective of future user. You’re trying to capture the core essence of the product. What will users like or dislike about the product? How enthusiastic are they, and what can you modify to increase their enthusiasm? This activity forces you to focus on the single differentiator that defines every memorable product.

Write a fake press release. Conceive the ideal product in your head and write an announcement to prospective users about it, listing out the problems it solves, a summary of how it works, a catchy title, instructions on the first steps, and even a call-to-action. You can even write pretend testimonials about what you want customers to say.

As you think about your product and what it takes to become an expert, I like to break this down to steps into something I call the “Ladder of Engagement”. You should be able to break down your product into specific skills or tasks someone needs to understand to get the most out of your product. Not all users will (or need to!) make it to the top of the ladder to get value out of it. But you should understand what tasks in your product require more understanding of your product.

This might be easier with an example I created for Twitter when we were just starting the growth team. This was the Twitter Ladder of Engagement: (1) Understand what a Tweet is, (2) Start following people you are interested in / friends with to make a basic timeline, (3) Start checking and reading your timeline to see what’s new, (4) Make sure you have mobile apps installed so you can go back and forth with the web app, (5) Begin to engage and participate — @ reply, retweets, favorites and even Tweet yourself, (6) Run your first searches and see what other people are saying on Twitter. (7) Learn to build your following (we didn’t expect most users to get here, but we expected power users would care and want to).

This ladder was valuable for us as we built the growth and onboarding flow. We focused primarily on 1–4 to get people going, and then step 5 as users were more prepared. It helped us decide which areas of the product to focus on, and helped us explain the product to users in a more stepwise fashion.

When there was all the talk of you [Slack] killing email, I have to admit I thought it was the email problem you were attacking, not just the email platform. Which is to say, I thought you were providing some relief from the torrential influx of messages, alerts, and notifications I was receiving on a daily basis. “Me + Slack = Fewer distractions and more productivity,” I thought at the time.

I have to say, though, that I’ve since found it to be the opposite. I’m finding that “always on” tendency to be a self-perpetuating feedback loop: the more everyone’s hanging out, the more conversations take place. The more conversations, the more everyone’s expected to participate. This really lowers the bar for what’s considered message-worthy to begin with.

Even your summaries of each week — the ones where you remind me about how our relationship is going — are all predicated on its volume of messages, which was kind of the opposite of what I thought you and I were all about.

Notes:
(1) This is a poignant example of a company mistaking user engagement for customer success. Samuel adopted Slack because he thought it would make him more productive. But Slack measures its success by user engagement (the volume of messages), which conflicts with its users’ goal to become more productive.
(2) This problem is widespread. The tech industry has mastered how to maximize user engagement, but we often lose sight of the real goal — to empower users to achieve something worthwhile. Scientific studies show that Facebook, the most successful consumer product ever built as measured by daily users, makes people less happy. We’ve made content consumption irresistible with bite-size snacking and alluring headlines, but have dumbed down content in the process. And we’ve developed addictive games which, after extended periods of usage, leave people feeling empty and purposeless.
(3) How can product managers avoid mistaking user engagement for customer success? (i) Research the Job To Be Done and articulate it explicitly. This provides a definition of customer success. (ii) List the key requirements for users to get the job done. (iii) Even if you can’t measure customer success directly, and need to use a proxy for customer success such as user engagement, ensure that every product decision is justified in terms of the Job To Be Done and customer success.
(4) Cf. The key metric for your startup must satisfy these 4 criteria.

“A senior manager in my organization has strong domain knowledge and is in some ways highly effective. But he demotivates his team members, for example by taking tasks from them because he says he can do them better. I also personally find him hard to work with: he tries to stop me from handling key negotiations where I have a better relationship with the other party, and fails to deliver on my requests. My options are: fire the manager, split his role into two and put him in a newly defined role where he doesn’t manage people, or try to work with him to improve. Which should I choose?”

What would you advise?

I tried to help the CEO make her decision by sharing my experience with this sort of situation generally. Here’s what I learned running Seeking Alpha:

The happiness of the team really matters. Sometimes you need to fire strong people because they are not pleasant to work with.

Don’t redefine a job description because of the incumbent’s deficiencies. When you eventually hire the right person, you’ll be surprised that you can in fact have everything, particularly if you give smart people time to learn.

Shunting people around from role to role rarely works. CEOs sometimes do it because they can’t bring themselves to fire someone. But if you can’t bring yourself to fire, you’ll end up not being able to hire.

Demoting people rarely works. Even if they are initially relieved at no longer having to do something they aren’t good at, in the medium term the demotion saps their self esteem and they leave.

As CEO, make sure you like working with your senior managers. If you’re unhappy, your company will feel it.

Good interpersonal skills are intrinsic to a manager’s job.

If you decide to keep the manager, make sure you have clear metrics for him. That way you’ll get out of subjective evaluation of his skills.

My father and mentor shared a great sales truth with me many years ago. He said: “Most people use the relationship to get the deal but the reality is the relationship is the deal.”

I often work with clients, coaching and mentoring them through a large deal. Sometimes we get to celebrate together, other times it’s more of a post mortem. In several cases recently the answer to “why?” was the would be big deal closer didn’t get the subtleties of the relationship and one-to-one communication. They got the features, advantages and benefits of their solution. They even identified client needs, pains and specific outcomes desired. What they didn’t get, which was the deal killer, was the person and what approach, type of communication, and behavior was appropriate with the prospect or prospects.

Burn less. This is directly related to “monetize earlier” and “scale slower”. The faster you monetize and the slower you scale, the chances are you’re going to burn less.

Burn less is about optionality. And the one thing you want as a founder of a startup are options. You’re going to die much much faster because you ran out of options. Options are really what it’s all about. Options give you a chance to control your own destiny. When the times get tough, if you have options, you can use them. Without optionality, you’re screwed.

Burn is more or less an indicator of your optionality. If you burn less and have more runway, you have options (or at least you can create options with enough time). If you burn more, you reduce your options while reducing how long you can exercise them. And this is one of those things that it’s very easy to convince yourself otherwise. Spending money is fun!

Trust me, your board and investors will likely not agree with you. When you are nervous and want to go slower, they won’t always agree and will push you. Not everyone, but most. And it will always be much more fun to burn faster, not gonna lie. Burning less takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline and organizational priority and restraint.

When things are looking up and to the right, everyone around you, including your investors, will be saying “go go go”. But if you slip up, they won’t be there to admit that they themselves pushed you in that direction.

Remember, you can always increase spending — that’s very easy. Reducing spending is very, very hard and takes so much longer than you realize.

Notes:
(1) I’m blessed to have wonderful VCs on the Seeking Alpha board. Nick Pianim of DAG Ventures, who is thoughtful, modest and insightful, would say exactly this: One of the key factors in startup success is time. So give yourself time.
(2) Cf. Reach versus monetization and Get to profitability — here’s how.

People don’t want to buy products. They want to hire products to get a job done. Or as Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt puts it: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” People do things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve — such as overcoming a boring commute, recovering from a stressful day or hanging framed photos on the wall. When people struggle they look out for solutions to achieve progress in their lives.

The Job-To-Be-Done framework has become popular in product design because it uncovers what causes people to hire products or services. Rather than understanding people by their demographic or socio-economic attributes, such as income or level of education, the framework focuses on satisfying needs by understanding the jobs people want to get done. Uncovering these jobs makes it easier to build the right solutions.

Takeaways:
1. Focus on understanding the job people want to get done and find out how the product fits into people’s lives.
2. Sell the product’s outcome, not the product itself: Beautiful, cut grass — not lawnmower or GM seeds.
3. Don’t care about direct competitors. Think about alternatives for achieving the same job and do the job better than any other solution out there.

The problem with User Stories as a framework to think about product is that they make too many assumptions and don’t acknowledge causality. When a task is put in the format of a user story — “As a [type of user], I want [some action], so that [outcome]” — there’s no room to ask ‘Why?’. You’re essentially locked into a particular sequence with no context.

A far better framework is what I call Job Stories, an idea from the really smart guys at intercom. Frame every design problem as a Job, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome: When _____ , I want to _____ , so I can _____ . For example, “when an important new customer signs up, I want to be notified, so I can start a conversation with them.”

The Job Stories framework is great because it makes you think about motivation and context, and de-emphasizes any particular implementation. Often, because people are so focused on the who and how, they totally miss the why. When you start to understand the why, your mind is then open to think of creative and original ways to solve the problem.

Notes:
(1) As Alan Klement shows above, whenever you specify a Job To Be Done, the emphasis is on what the person is trying to achieve, not performance of a task. So it’s easy to ask “Why does the person want to achieve that outcome?”. This question frequently leads you to a better solution than the one you’re considering.
(2) Framing every product task as a Job To Be Done can be powerfully combined with Joe Natoli’s framework for clarifying what your users care about. First, ask what the user is trying to achieve with this page, interface, feature or task (= Job To Be Done); then ask what information they most care about to get that job done (= information architecture).

Benefits: “It shines a light on the fact that what the people in the room think is important and what users or customers think is important are often not the same thing. It forces everyone in the room to step outside their preconceptions and inherent biases and put themselves in the shoes of users and customers. And it’s the quickest way I know to develop a clear, simple model for Information Architecture, saving everyone a tremendous amount of time, debate and headache.”

Notes:
(1) Thank you Daniel Riedler for the tip.
(2) It’s worth watching the video — it’s short, well produced, and informative.
(3) If you yourself are a typical user of your product, it’s easier to get user-centric design intuitively right. But if you’re not a typical user of your own product, forcing yourself to write down what you think users care about is critical. It uncovers your assumptions, opens them up for discussion, and makes them easy to test.
(4) This can also be useful within the Job To Be Done framework: once you’ve stated your users’ Job To Be Done, list and rank the requirements for performing the job successfully, and then validate them with users.

1. Be nice and be respectful. It may sound obvious, but I often hear the words “I just want him/her to be nice to me.”

2. Don’t take one another for granted. Remember to express appreciation for even the most mundane tasks.

3. Be curious, not defensive. If your partner seems upset, anxious or depressed, and snaps at you, don’t assume he/she is angry with you. Staying non-reactive and curious will allow you to provide the space to really listen.

4. Provide empathy. When your partner is feeling down, you may be tempted to judge, analyze, provide a solution, or try to rid your partner of his/her negative emotions. The best thing to say may just be “I am sorry you’re upset” followed by “What can I do?”

5. Fight fair. All couples fight, but it’s how you fight that matters. Do not threaten or blame. Try to be specific rather than use words such as “always” or “never.” Express remorse authentically and make sure to recover from the dispute with words of affirmation.

6. Be honest and authentic. This helps to create safety and security in the relationship.

7. Be direct. Don’t hesitate to invite your partner to hear what you want and what you need.

8. Be aware of each other’s triggers. Be sensitive to your partner’s sensitivities and what may make her/him reactive.

Never ask a busy person to lunch. Busy execs hate lunches. They are time sucks. Sure, they like to occasionally meet good friends or important contacts for lunch, or do group lunches. But somebody they don’t know? Not so much. Same with dinner — a dinner out is a night I don’t get to spend with my kids and family.

So what can you do? “Hey, can I bring you a coffee and get 30 minutes of your time at your offices next Tues or Wed? I promise I won’t overrun my time.” And don’t. You become an easy second date to accept.

Notes:
(1) If you want to get a meeting or call with someone, make your request specific, attractive and convenient so they can accept it immediately:

Time: Suggest at least three possible times in your initial email. This maximizes the chance that one of them will be convenient, and they’ll be able to say “yes” without further iteration.

Because personas are a mashup of assumptions and attributes, they can have a destructive effect on product design. They can give a false sense of knowing the customer and can thereby lead to gaps in design. For example, you can’t ask a persona about their anxieties, why they chose Product A vs Product B, what else was going on when they chose Product A vs Product B, or that when they first opened your app they didn’t know what to do first….

Specication of a Job To Be Done can only come from real customer interviews. Before designing a feature or new product, you must talk to real people and uncover all the anxieties and contexts which were in play when they used your or a competitor’s product.

Notes:
(1) Early stage startups often describe their product as meeting a “market need”. But markets don’t have needs; real people have needs. Just as Alan Klement shows that personas, “a mashup of assumptions and attributes”, can have “a destructive effect on product design”, so too the abstract concept of “market need” can have a destructive effect on your startup’s positioning.
(2) Job To Be Done is a powerful framework for startup positioning, not just for product management. When you think about a Job To Be Done, you are forced to think about a concrete person (= target customer). You can then ask (i) How many other people share this Job To Be Done (= market size)? (ii) What solution do these people currently use to get this job done (= competition, including surprising competition)? (iii) How did the user find that solution (marketing and distribution)? (iv) Does the user currently pay to get this job done (= proven monetization potential)? (v) How valuable is this Job To Be Done for the user (= pricing potential)?
(3) To get to the right answers, clarify what your users ultimately care about. To do that, keep asking “Why does the user care about that?”, until you get to the point where the answer is completely obvious. (Cf. 5 Whys.)
(4) Cf. Documenting your product-market fit hypotheses.

We delayed monetization way too long, using venture capital to extend the time to create a sustainable monetization engine for our business. We always had a plan for monetization, but we waited way too long to get focused on it.

The conundrum that a lot of companies face — in fact most of them — is the balance between reach and revenue (or in another way to frame it: the conflict between the two). The further you maximize reach the harder it is to scale revenue — or at the very least, more friction is introduced in capturing it.

Everyone loves something for free. However, I would prefer to have fewer dedicated power users that get enough value and can’t live without it that they are willing to pay for it, than a lot of users that like it only on the condition that it’s always free.

We learned that it’s never too early to charge (something, anything) if you want to eventually have a business that is sustainable. Even if you have to risk reach in some regards. That won’t always make you the most popular startup but maybe you’ll be around when others fail.

Notes:
(1) It might be OK to delay monetization if you know exactly how you will generate revenue, and you want to optimize for reach over monetization at this stage. The problem is that most startups that delay monetization haven’t figured out how to generate revenue successfully. Revenue generation is core to building a company — it impacts the product, the target customer base, the distribution channels, and the HR structure of the company. So figuring it out shouldn’t be delayed.
(2) Re. “we delayed monetization way too long, using venture capital…”: cf. Why you should bootstrap your startup before raising money.
(3) Cf. Get to profitability — here’s how.